"Glad I get a choice in the matter."
"Cal. You're forty-one years old. You make an obscene amount of money. You haven't been taking care of yourself. You haven't taken a real vacation since the year my daughter was born and she's about to start the third grade. The last time we had drinks you told me — and I'm quoting — that you'd realized you hadn't laughed out loud in a month and you found it 'professionally inconvenient' that our hangouts were starting to affect your meetings. Do you remember saying that?"
I did remember saying that.
"You're not okay," he said. "And I'm not going to lecture you, because I love you and because I know lecturing you is the fastest way to make sure you never call me again. But I am going to do one thing."
He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a small card.
It was matte black, about the size of a business card, with nothing printed on it except a stylized symbol I couldn't immediately parse. It was something that looked like the cross-section of a wave, or maybe a horn, in a dull silver foil. He set it down on the table between us and slid it across with two fingers.
"What is this," I said.
"It's a membership card."
"To what."
"To a place," he said carefully, "that I have used, intermittently, for almost a decade to keep myself sane. And which, frankly, I have been meaning to put in your hand for about that long."
I picked up the card. It was heavier than it looked. The silver foil caught the light and seemed to shift slightly when I turned it, the way some inks do when they're worth more than other inks.
"There's no name on it."
"There wouldn't be."
"Hollis."
"Cal."
"What is this?"
He took a slow sip of his drink, set it down, folded his hands on the table, and looked at me with the steady, unembarrassed seriousness of a man who had decided in advance that this conversation was going to happen no matter what I did with my face.
"It's a bathhouse," he said.
I waited.
"In the warehouse district. East side, off Atlantic Avenue. You won't find it on a map by name and there's no sign on the building, but the address is on the back of the card." He tapped the edge of it. "It's a metal door in a brick wall with one bulb above it and a little neon OPEN sign and that's it. You'd drive past it every day for a year and not know it was there. Which is, again, the point."
"Okay? So what’s it for?"
"Just hear me out."
The tone in his voice told me everything I needed to know. "I'm not going to a brothel, Hollis."
"You haven't heard me out."
"I don't need to hear you out. I'm a forty-one-year-old senior partner at a white-shoe law firm. I am not going to a — " I lowered my voice, even though no one was within twenty feet of us. " — to awhorehouse,Hollis."
"Why not?"
The question stopped me, because I genuinely could not, in the moment, come up with a reason that wasn'tbecause I am not that kind of person that does that sort of thing,which was the exact answer I'd been giving myself about everything for years, and which had not been working out for me.
He saw my face and pressed his advantage. "I'm not telling you to do anything you don't want to do. I'm not handing you a prescription. I'm handing you acard.You take the card. You put it in your wallet. You forget about it for a week. And then, the next time you find yourself at ten o'clock on a Friday night microwaving leftover pad thai and watching a documentary about cargo ships because you can't think of anything else to do, and don’t argue with me I know how you are,” he added, cutting me off. “I want you to remember that there is, in your wallet, a little black card. And you decide what to do about it."
I looked down at the card. The silver foil caught the light again. The bar's soft jazz murmured somewhere in the background. Two tables over, a couple was laughing about something I couldn't hear.
"You said it's a bathhouse," I said slowly.
